http://www.budiu.info/blog About computers and "science" Mon, 21 Jan 2008 07:36:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Put side to side a laptop and a mainframe from 40 years ago and you will be amazed by the astonishing evolution.  Not only are hardware resources many orders of magnitude larger, but also the software is immensely more powerful and sophisticated.  Operating systems appeared in the '60, for managing ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2008/01/20/a-planetary-operating-system/ Updated: fixed a broken link. I read a very interesting business book about how great companies are built.  (I am not the only one, the cover boasts "more than 1 million sold.")  The book is "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies."  I am providing the Amazon link, but you ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/09/30/the-plan-behind-google/ R. W. Johnson Jr., the founder of Johnson and Johnson liked to say frequently about his company: "Failure is our most important product." He meant that J&J learned how to create useful products by attempting to create many unsuccessful ones as well. There is no way to predict the outcome of ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/08/13/research-failures/ More on Presentation Mistakes A few years ago I have given a very short talk about giving effective talks; I still think that was a good summary, so I am providing the link above, to the PowerPoint slides. BTW, I love PowerPoint. I think that it is a great tool, which ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/08/05/more-on-presentation-mistakes/ You have worked hard to earn a Ph.D., and now you are looking for a job, either in an academic position (in a university), or in an industrial research lab, or perhaps in some other place where you have to use your recently earned qualifications. For this transition you ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/07/22/some-common-job-interview-mistakes/ I would like to point out an interesting correlation between high quality research labs and monopolies: AT&T had a monopoly on long distance telephone service for most of the 20th century in the United States. In 1925 AT&T has created Bell Labs, one of the most famous research laboratories ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/07/08/computing-research-and-monopolies/ The higher (i.e., university) education in the United States is really good. In fact, it is so good that it is a significant "export" of the United States. Here is some data from an Oct 2006 Congressional Report: In FY2005, the Department of State issued 565,790 [student] visas, making ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/06/23/academics-love-themselves/ The meaning given to the word [computer-related] "research" is not the same in universities (i.e. academia) and in industrial research labs. (Research has yet other meanings, that I won't touch, for example, "market research.") The fact that "research" has two meanings is quite subtle, because these two meanings do ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/06/15/research-in-academia-vs-industry/ Leslie Lamport in his office, May 2007 Leslie Lamport is a legendary figure of computing. While he is probably most well-known because of the open-source typesetting LaTeX macro package and book, arguably his most important contributions are in the domain of distributed systems; this is also the subject of this ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-leslie-lamport/ Chuck Thacker in his office, October 2006 Chuck Thacker is one of the 16 technical fellows of Microsoft - the highest technical position one can achieve among the 75000+ employees of Microsoft.   He has been one of the main designers and builders of the Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, in 1972, and one of the inventors ... http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/02/22/an-interview-with-chuck-thacker/